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A Women's Religious History blogTue, 31 Mar 2015 21:57:13 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.png » Archivalhttps://scholaristas.wordpress.com
From the Archives: Sex Scandals, Feminism, and Touring the Stateshttps://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/from-the-archives-sex-scandals-feminism-and-touring-the-states/
https://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/from-the-archives-sex-scandals-feminism-and-touring-the-states/#commentsSat, 13 Aug 2011 08:40:27 +0000http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/?p=584]]>For the last couple of weeks, I have been doing research at Girton, the first women’s college in Britain. Located just outside of Cambridge and surrounded by acres of grass, trees, and gardens, the college was founded in the 1860s by Emily Davies, Barbara Bodichon, and a host of other Victorian feminists who were dedicated to the education of girls. The buildings are made of red brick and are a bit drafty, even in the midst of the British summer. The other day I found in the papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes a bit of information related to Mormonism. Parkes and her father were discussing a sex scandal involving one of their friends Emily Faithfull. Faithfull had been forced to take the stand in a divorce trial, in which she was accused of having improper relations with both the husband and the wife. Perhaps the oddest story to come from the trial was that the husband had crawled into bed with Faithfull and tried to have sex with her, while his wife was sleeping just inches away in the same bed. Parkes felt that Faithfull had committed irreparable breach of propriety, and other women involved with the feminist movement worried that the two would never be friends again. Of course, the case brought Faithfull quite a bit of notoriety. She was rumored to walk around in men’s clothing and insisted on defending her choices by writing fictionalized accounts of her life.

Faithfull’s identity as a feminist and experiences as a result of the divorce case inspired to undertake a trip to the United States to try to understand the position of women. She, of course, made the obligatory stop in Utah, where she attended Eliza R. Snow’s 80th birthday party and interviewed polygamist wives. Faithfull was disgusted by what she saw in Utah and gave anti-Mormon lectures once she returned to Britain. Although her book is just as acidic and vituperative as Fanny Stenhouse’s, it’s focus is different. Unlike other anti-Mormon writers, Faithfull was quite open to the possibility that nineteenth-century understandings of domesticity needed revising. She worried about the effect that property laws, which denied married women access to their earnings, had on the ability of women to survive within abusive relationships and wanted to provide women with the opportunity to work. Her concern with Mormonism was not necessarily the multiplication of marital bonds but with the fact that men retained control over property.

Faithfull was not the only women with a scandalous sexual past to visit Utah in the 19th C. Theresa Longworth Yelverton had been involved in a sex scandal in the 1850s, when she had secretly married an Irish peer only to have him marry another woman and then deny that their marriage had ever occurred. The laws of Scotland, where Theresa claimed the marriage had taken place, added ambiguity to the situation. In Scotland, a marriage needed no witness, no clergy, and no legal documents to be valid. All a couple had to do was declare their marriage. Longworth claimed that she had had sex with Yelverton after he had married her in a secret ceremony and that her reputation would be ruined if the judge refused to recognize the validity of their marriage. During the trial, Yelverton’s lawyers read letters that Longworth had sent to the Irish peer, which painted her as a sexual voracious young woman who had given herself to the Irishman long before any promise of marriage and who had acted as the pursuer rather than as the prey during their courtship. Although judges in Ireland would accept her marriage, those in Scotland denied it. Longworth denied the status of being a legitimate wife in parts of Britain but not in others traveled to the United States. She found Mormonism far more congenial and barely escaped, according to her account, without the noose of polygamy around her neck.

Although quite different, the books that Faithfull and Longworth published about their experiences suggest that they saw Utah and the United States as a type of laboratory in which different relationships between the sexes could be tested. Neither had been particularly pleased with traditional understandings of domesticity or wanted to defend it absolutely. Responses to Mormonism in the 19th C were part of a much larger debate about sexuality and marriage. In the second of the nineteenth century, feminists and more traditional scholars alike were worried about a supposed surplus of women that existed in the Victorian period. Spinsterhood, poverty, and even prostitution were seen as likely outcomes for such women who had to rely on their family members for support. Polygamy was offered, and not just by Mormons, as a possible solution. Looking at the writings of Faithfull and Longworth reminds us of the complexity of nineteenth-century understandings of domesticity. Polygamy was often placed against the Victorian angel in the house in contemporary newspaper, and the historiography surrounding Mormonism has drawn on this juxtaposition to talk about the ways in which Mormons were racialized by their contemporaries. It is important to remember, however, the image of the Victorian angel in the house was always under assault and was much more fragile than she appeared.

For the works of Emily Faithfull and Theresa Longworth Yelverton on Mormonism, see Emily Faithfull, “Three Visits to America” (1884) and Theresa Longworth Yelverton, “Teresina in America” (1875).

]]>https://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/from-the-archives-sex-scandals-feminism-and-touring-the-states/feed/2amanda5245Heathen Polygamy in the Anglican Archiveshttps://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/heathen-polygamy-in-the-anglican-archives/
https://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/heathen-polygamy-in-the-anglican-archives/#commentsWed, 01 Jun 2011 17:03:47 +0000http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/?p=500]]>I began my archival research for my dissertation at the Lambeth Palace Library today. To find it, you cross Vauxhall, Lambeth, or any of a number of bridges over the Thames and turn onto the Lambeth Palace Road. On one side of you will be the river; on the other, a wall with a sprawling complex of medieval buildings, old churches, and gardens on the other. After a few yards, you’ll come to a small black door with a sign assuring you’ve come to the right place if you want to see the exhibition and that a guard will await you between the hours of 10:50 and 4 and that if you want to use the library, you should ring the buzzer.

Inside the library I read the Papers of the Committee on the Polygamy of Heathen Converts. Appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the committee was to decide whether or not men who had contracted polygamous marriages before they converted to Christianity should be forced to put away their extra wives as a requirement for baptism. The committee answered with an unqualified yes. Strangely, women involved in polygamous relationships did not have the same requirement. They could continue to live as polygamous wives without jeopardizing their baptism or ability to receive the sacraments.

One of the things that surprised me about the committee’s report and the letters that had been sent to them about polygamy as they were deliberating was how different portrayals of African polygamists were from Mormon polygamists.

Bishop Crowther argued that polygamy sapped men’s virility. He wrote in his “Notes on the Life of Polygamy in West Africa” (Lambeth Confernece Papers, 1888) that “the lust of the flesh immoderately indulged in leads to excess, which debilitates a man and incapacitates him to perform the marriage duty all.” He then tells the story of a chief who asked them to help him perform his marriage duty when he and Rev. C.A. Golmer first arrived in the neighborhood of Badagry in the Yoruba Mission – “Mr. Gollmers interpreted and myself being Natives of the Country, and masters of the language; the head Chief very confidently opened his mind to the interpreter, and told him of a complaint for which he wanted to ask medicine from the white man, because he was told that the Europeans were very skilful in many things. His complaint was a delicate one; which was inability to perform the marriage duty with his wives; for this he begged the white man’s assistance by way of medicines to strengthen him That the missionary took the opportunity of telling the Chief of the life of polygamy as a breach of God’s holy Ordinance, who in wisdom appointed one woman to each man, I need not waste time to relate. Though his case was irremediable, yet for the benefit of his health, he gave him some port wine.”

Although Mormon polygamists were rarely portrayed as stunning examples of manhood, they also were rarely portrayed as impotent. According to the dozens of stories in Fanny Stenhouse, Ann Eliza Young, and Maria Ward, young women were often left alone and pregnant by their polygamous husbands. This may not speak loads about their marital fealty, but it does suggest that Mormon men were at least perceived as being able to perform sexually.

A lot of work has been done on the ways in which Mormons were racialized. As Sarah Barringer Gordon has pointed out in the Mormon question, Mormon men were often seen as being kin to the Turks who kept harems. Reading the Papers of the Committee on the Polygamy of Heathen Converts, however, suggests that there is more work to be done in considering how Mormons were represented and whether those representations differed from the ways in which native polygamists were pictured.